As the price of petrol climbs to another record high, the government is coming under renewed pressure from consumer groups to look at cutting the current fuel duty.

While prices at the pumps vary greatly up and down the country, the average price per litre is the widely accepted benchmark for comparison purposes. Drivers in Britain are probably the worst hit in Europe perhaps even the world, when it comes to levels of tax and duty they have to pay on each litre of petrol.

The coalition government have said that they are studying the possibility and feasibility of introducing a scheme by which fuel duty would fall as the price of oil rose. However, such a scheme is likely to take a very long time to research and implement, and this has led to calls from people for the government to simply cut fuel duty (even if only temporarily).

This is not the first time such a scheme has been discussed as a possibility. Indeed one of the Conservative party’s main election pledges was to introduce what they called “fair fuel stabiliser”.

Businesses, especially those who are directly affected by the price of fuel such as the transport and logistics sector, have criticised the government for what they view as stalling.

The way the current fuel prices are setup, it is a significant revenue stream for the government, with so much going straight into the treasury. At a time when the country has an incredibly large deficit from which they are trying to recover from, they may be reluctant to make any changes which will reduce their income.

Over the last month, the price of fuel has steadily continued to rise, with more rise to come in April. This has not been helped by the increase in VAT to 20% which took place this month and increased the price of fuel even further still.

If you are a diesel user you may be pleased, or maybe not, to know that while unleaded petrol prices are at their all time highest, the price per litre of diesel fuel has not yet to break its previous record high price.

To see how we rank in the fuel prices European league table check out the chart below.

The charts illustrate how much drivers in Europe pay for their fuel per litre at the pumps.

For ease of comparison all prices are quoted in Euros.

At the time of publishing the Euro was valued at approximately 84 Pence.